Ron Kind: “I think we need to be thoughtful and deliberative in regard to increasing access to the public lands. Obviously, we have…”

“I think we need to be thoughtful and deliberative in regard to increasing access to the public lands. Obviously, we have a lot of access already. I think it would behoove us to spend a little bit of time trying to improve the safety and environmentally-friendly measures of being able to extract some of these resources that already exist, because we also have problems in that. Again, I hate to keep plugging the Anchorage Daily News, but on April 17 this year they reported a huge pipeline leak up in the North Slope of Alaska, which is one of the largest spills to occur in the last 10 years. Some 92,000 gallons of salt water and crude oil leaked from a pipeline at Kuparuk Oil Field in April. The pipeline burst, and this is a problem we have with current infrastructure when it comes to the extraction of gas and oil is we have a very old infrastructure with the eroding and corroding pipes that are leaking. In fact, there have been four major oil spills in the North Slope of Alaska within the last 6 months alone.”